Eroding the Pull of Piracy-A Bilateral Approach — Be sure to check out filmmaker Ellen Seidler’s newly launched blog, Vox Indie, featuring “commentary, memes & more from creative culture.” Here, Seidler notes recent news that offer “compelling evidence that ongoing efforts to fight online piracy should include a bilateral effort to alter consumer habits–via legal means (legislation) in tandem with the continued development of new business models.”

Streaming media could have larger carbon footprint than plastic discs — A provocative new report from Music Tank reveals the extent that information is not free. The report’s author notes, “Streaming or downloading 12 tracks, without compression, just 27 times by one user would, in energy terms, equate to the production and shipping of one physical 12-track CD album,” and “unlicensed file sharing could consume the equivalent of up to four times the annual combined electricity consumption of all UK households.”

Why Are Google DMCA Notices Skyrocketing? — Plagiarism Today’s Jonathan Bailey examines the reason that DMCA notices to Google have increased so rapidly within the past few months. Bailey notes it is not so much because the amount of notices have increased, but because the search giant has relaxed previous throttles on the amount of notices allowed and begun working through its backlog — a backlog that explains why, as has been reported, some recent notices have targeted content that has already been removed.

Emmy-Nominated TV Shows Hit Home — The Primetime Emmy Awards are next Sunday, the 23rd. CreativeAmerica takes a look at some of the nominated shows and their contributions to state jobs and economies.

Warner Bros. eyes the future through its ‘tech ops’ — Fascinating profile of Warner Bros. “tech lab” at its Burbank studio. The LA Times says, “This might be a sneak peek at the future of the modern studio, where the digitization of delivery systems and the power of social media mean that making great movies and television shows is no longer enough to succeed. The new studio needs to manage complex processes as efficiently as Google and reach consumers as aggressively as Apple.”

Blood to Rain, in a Bag of Tricks— Take an inside look at the world of theatrical props in this NY Times profile of an informal gathering of prop professionals last week. “‘It’s kind of the stepchild of theater,’ said Faye Armon, a properties coordinator who works often at Lincoln Center Theater. Theatergoers probably understand what costume, set and lighting designers do. Their work can be eye-catching, and their names appear on a program’s main credit page. They get their own Tony Award category. But a props master?”

How Kansas City taxpayers support Google Fiber — Ars Technica reports that “Google Fiber isn’t exactly a free-market success story.” As they point out, former FCC official Fred Campbell says, “Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees. City officials also expedited the permitting process and assigned staff specifically to help Google. One county even offered to allow Google to hang its wires on parts of utility poles—for free—that are usually off-limits to communications companies.”

ACTA: Will It Ever Become A Valid International Treaty? — IP Watch provides an update on the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The multilateral agreement has run into some opposition. It needs ratification from six member parties to go into effect; currently it has been signed (but not ratified) by seven nations.

Assessing the Academic Literature Regarding the Impact of Media Piracy on Sales — Though filesharing denialists will likely ignore this, a new report shows that piracy’s effects on media sales is very real. The authors note, “Based on our review of the empirical literature we conclude that, while some papers in the literature find no evidence of harm, the vast majority of the literature (particularly the literature published in top peer reviewed journals) finds evidence that piracy harms media sales.”

3 Comments

The comments on the carbon footprint article are overwhelmingly upset about the article’s conclusions; it seems tech users do not want to even think about the environmental effect of technology’s need for endless growth. Perhaps the biggest mistake made by the commenters is the myth of energy efficiency; they argue that as CPUs get faster, bandwidth gets cheaper, harddrives get bigger and compression schemes get stronger, the energy used by streaming media will go down. The fallacy is that as energy costs get cheaper, it becomes more valuable to use it, and the net energy used actually goes up. When YouTube began, it was probably far more expensive to serve the few videos it had. Now with everything cheaper, it can serve more videos, and has increased video sizes to HD quality. In the coming years, it will probably start serving cinema-quality films, and potentially even IMAX-quality films. As bandwidth gets cheaper, it becomes feasible to offer streaming YouTube on mobile phones, and now you have a sudden dramatic rise in data moving over the networks.

When the Internet was in its early days, streaming a video took a lot of energy; the video itself was low-quality, uncompressed and the algorithms used to send it were unrefined. Today, you have faster bandwidth, faster computers, better compression schemes… better everything, in fact. But you are not just sending that one low-quality video; you are streaming hundreds of high-quality videos to thousands (or even millions) of users.

So it’s important, even if the linked article above plays fast and loose with some of its calculations, to consider the environmental impact of technology, even if you feel the technology itself is a good thing. Technology will not inevitably solve its own energy usage.

I find it curious that the EFF and other groups have framed the ACTA controversy around the “entertainment industry”. This provision isn’t about the entertainment industry. This is about counterfeit in all forms. Be it counterfeit dog food poisoning pets to poison pills killing patients. Faulty electronics that can and will and do cause fires and injury, to the endless supply of counterfeit low quality crap passed off as the real deal.
I don’t see how we can have a global economy, if we can’t have a base set of rules that all must abide by. The thieves are running a multi-billion dollar business putting ordinary hard working citizens out of work, and putting the public at large at risk. This isn’t about “freedom” or “sharing” this is about large-scale organized crime syndicates running rampid across borders.

About

Copyhype provides news and info on current developments relating to copyright law, the media industries, and the digital economy. It cuts through the hype to bring reasoned discussion aimed at both legal and nonlegal audiences.

Terry Hart is currently VP Legal Policy and Copyright Counsel at the Copyright Alliance. Any opinions expressed on this site remain his own and not necessarily those of his present or any past employers.